It has not been a simple task to circumspectly read Hajat Syda Bbumba's budget speech she presented on June 10, the background to the budget for this financial year, and your State of the Nation address, Mr President, to be able to critique your Government's fiscal proposals from an informed position.

After delving into loads of well-thought out statements, statistics, charts, tables, and graphs that make up the three documents above, I am now standing at an informed viewpoint to let you know, Mr President, that your Government's budget for 2010/11 is nothing but utopia.

I am not so naïve to fail to know that this year's budget was framed amid a transition from the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) to the National Development Plan (NDP), election-year fever, and an uncertain economic outlook thanks to the on-going global economic recession. And, therefore, we appreciate that its shape must reflect these three elements. This I know.

I also happen to subscribe to a school of thought that detests long-term planning. This is mainly because by its very nature planning tends to cherish utopianism, populism and expansionism, things that I detest with relish. I, therefore, took time to prepare my mind to critique the budget with minimum value judgments.

Planning has already eroded sensible budgeting
Mr President, using the NDP as the guiding tool for framing the national budget has already registered the first causality -- your budget has lost focus, focal points to guide allocation of the meagre national resources in an optimal manner.

Hajat Bbumba was pressured into adopting the entire list of constraints identified by the NDP as impeding the economy's growth and made them priority areas to finance at once. These include; inadequate physical infrastructure, low levels of innovation, inadequate supply of production inputs, poor quality of human resource, high cost of financial services, and poor mind-set and limited business entrepreneurship.

She is not given any option but to believe that the ideal thing to do is for her ministry to commit resources, in the medium term, to address the challenges above in order to: increase household incomes, create jobs, increase people's access to quality social services, promote technological innovations, and promote good governance and democracy -- the objectives of NDP.

She tries to do exactly that but like a captain in charge of the Titanic with too few lifeboats, Bbumba allocates the available lifeboats to what she feels are more priority of the priority sectors, and definitely many others run out of luck.

Typical of plans, the NDP has already eroded sensible budgeting by making each and every structural constraint in the country a priority. And it does this without considering whether resources to address them are available or not. Ultimately the budget has lost focus and got scattered across an undefined scope.

Budget or political football?
And this particular budget is distorted further by its unfortunate timing. It not only comes at a time when the country is reverting to planning but also, and most importantly, when we are going to the polls.    

The structure, tone, and provisions of the 2010/11 budget make it look more of a political football than a fiscal-year budget. Undoubtedly, the budget fell in the usual trap of election year giveaways. Almost all allocations were influenced by politics.

Take the example of roads; Government allocated 14.4% of the Shs. 7,180 billion total resource envelope on roads. But when one analyses the kinds of roads that were budgeted for one realises that government prioritised "political" roads rather than business/production roads ahead of the 2011 elections.

Roads such as, Dokolo - Lira; Lira - Kamdini; Kampala - Gayaza - Zirobwe - Wobulenzi; Matugga - Semuto - Kapeeka; Fort Portal - Bundibugyo - Lamia; Mpigi - Kabulasoke - Maddu - Sembabule; and Vurra - Arua - Koboko - Oraba, are more of vote hunters than business/production oriented.

The incentives that Hajat Bbumba offered innovators and entrepreneurs are themselves more political than fiscal. She gave them 0.2% of the budget, specifically to cater for salary enhancement for scientists, entrepreneurial training, and a start-up fund for graduates. However, a closer look at these incentives suggests that they are too micro to have a significant impact on the level of technological innovation and entrepreneurship in this country.   

Additionally, election-year budgets typically tend to be expansionary yet with no new taxes introduced to mobilise resources to finance the swelling budget. Bbumba's budget this year is not exceptional.

She instead of levying new taxes cuts taxes on boda-bodas by Shs. 80,000, purely a political fiscal initiative since we all know reduction of registration levy for boda-bodas will not necessarily trickle down to passengers to have any insignificant impact on transport cost. A fuel tax cut would have had a more macro impact, but since it makes more political sense and yet also fiscally cheaper to marshal support of boda-boda riders NRM opted for the latter.

Agriculture once again gets a raw deal